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Google’s self-driving car – now emblazoned with a “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker – is hitting the streets Tuesday in Austin.

As we mentioned Monday, the Google vehicle has generated a ton of buzz at the two-day Texas Transportation Forum in Austin. That excitement reached a crescendo Tuesday, as Google product manager Anthony Levandowski overviewed the self-driving program during a panel discussion.

And a few lucky VIPs – including some Texas Department of Transportation officials – even got to experience the self-driving machine first-hand during a series of 10-minute test drives.

“The remarkable thing was that it was a little unremarkable,” said Coby Chase, TxDOT’s director of government and public affairs. “It was smooth. It was completely safe. … It was kind of cool watching other cars turn and look at us and their jaws dropping.”

Google’s self-driving car program, in existence for for about eight years, features about a dozen such vehicles.

The cars are capable of driving completely by themselves, thanks to cameras, a detailed mapping system and a rotating laser that sits atop the car. All the gizmos allow the car to “see” the road — and other drivers — although someone typically still sits in the driver’s seat as a precaution.

Tom Benning/Staff

The Google self-driving car now has a "Don't Mess With Texas" sticker.

Accelerating, braking and turning — it’s all done by the car.

“It was just magic,” Chase said. “We’ve waited our whole lives to see something like this.”

So what’s Google doing in the car business? Levandowski said it’s pretty simple: the company wanted to know what a car would be like today if the computer had been invented before the car.

“We’re a technology company that loves to solve hard problems,” he said.

A huge component of the Google effort is safety. Levandowski pointed to research that 95 percent of automobile collisions are caused by user error and that a sizable chunk are the result of distracted driving.

A self-driving car would potentially help address reduce accidents, and Levandowski said Google research shows that their driver-less machine has actually outperformed professional drivers in reacting to some potential collision scenarios.

The self-driving portion of the Austin demo was limited to Interstate 35. But the Google cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles on all kinds of roads in California, and even the brief Texas test displayed the car’s ability to navigate some tricky stretches.

In fact, Levandowski said he expects self-driving cars to become more of a reality in the next five years.

Three states — California, Nevada and Florida — have already passed laws to allow some self-driving cars. And while no states specifically prohibit self-driving cars, Google officials said, there’s an effort to further clarify the transportation code on the matter.

Levandowski said the biggest challenge going forward would be testing the self-driving car further and proving to drivers and regulators that machine truly is ready for the stressful demands of the roadway.

“How do we prove and understand and back up with statistics and data the reliability and safety of the system?” he said.

There’s plenty of interesting panel discussions left at the two-day Texas Transportation Forum in Austin, but one presentation is already stealing the show: Google’s self-driving car.

Now to be clear, the Lexus hybrid is currently sitting stationary outside the Austin Hilton’s lobby. But that hasn’t stopped hordes of conference attendees from ducking out between meetings to gawk at the vehicle and pose for lots of photos.

For some perspective on the Google car — and why it could be important — Glen Hiemstra, founder of the futurist.com, noted during an afternoon discussion that the machine could travel only a few blocks three or four years ago. Now, he said, “you can drive it 75 mph up and down the California highways.”

Perhaps most amazing is that the self-driving cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles, but they’ve had only two accidents, Hiemstra said.

“If you could take those automobiles and make the technologically feasible, economically viable and socially and politically acceptable, … you could reduce accidents by 90 percent,” he said.

We’ll keep an eye out for the big moment, so we can hopefully capture some video. And seeing as how my ride is currently in the shop in Austin — after encountering some car trouble on the way down this morning — perhaps I can convince Google to use the self-driving machine as a loaner.

Check out a video of one of Google’s self-driving cars after the jump.